varied (PowerPoint 2003)

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I am a high school teacher. I recently helped a colleague to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for graduation. It was basically a straightforward presentation with 93 slides and an audio track. I successfully packaged the presenation to CD. However, I encountered the following situations:
1. We attempted to copy to a CD-RW. We got an error message that said there was no writeable CD. Instead, I copied to a folder using that option on “Package for CD” I then copied that folder to the CD-RW. Why could I not copy to CD-RW with Copy to CD? Ultimately, I used a CD-R and had no problems. The presentation played fine on more than one computer using PowerPoint.
2. There was one slide where the text was garbled when it was played through the PowerPoint Viewer. Yet, when the slide was played through PowerPoint itself, it played perfectly. I noticed this on two computers. On two other computers, the slide played perfectly. The font used is Algerian. Is it possible that the viewer is a weaker program?
3. I insisted on using Package for CD. Another colleague stated that Package for CD was not necessary. He felt that File>Save As would be good enough. I explained that that procedure would not bring over the necessary audio files. Is there any other answer (clean) that I could have given him since he was not satisfied with my explanation?
Thank you very much.

Sincerely,
Alan Silberlight

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1. Could be a problem with the CD drive or drivers?

2. The viewer lacks some of the features of the real thing, but unless the font was missing, I don’t see why Algerian should behave differently than Arial.

3. In such cases, “let’s try it both ways” sometimes is the best approach.

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1. We attempted to copy to a CD-RW. We got an error message that said there was no writeable CD. Instead, I copied to a folder using that option on “Package for CD” I then copied that folder to the CD-RW. Why could I not copy to CD-RW with Copy to CD? Ultimately, I used a CD-R and had no problems. The presentation played fine on more than one computer using PowerPoint.

Glad to hear you got the whole “package for CD” thing worked out.

For some reason I cannot remember, PPT has issues with using CD-RW with Package for CD. Or maybe it’s Windows that has the issue. Regardless, one of them doesn’t like CD-RW! (Which version of Windows do you have?)

You were smart to try CD-R, as that usually works. And for that matter, I think you were smart to try the option to Copy to Folder, as that’s actually how I prefer to do the whole package for CD thing — copy to folder and then burn the contents of the folder to the CD using Nero.

2. There was one slide where the text was garbled when it was played through the PowerPoint Viewer. Yet, when the slide was played through PowerPoint itself, it played perfectly. I noticed this on two computers. On two other computers, the slide played perfectly. The font used is Algerian. Is it possible that the viewer is a weaker program?

Well, the Viewer is definitely not designed to be PowerPoint. It doesn’t support macros or Active X or printing more than one slide per page or various things like that. But it usually does display properly. (I say usually, as there are a few known bugs.)

I suspect that the issue you ran into had to do with video drivers or hardware acceleration on the machines in question. I know, I know, the file played in PPT itself on those machines but not on the Viewer; unfortunately I can’t answer exactly why and can only offer guesses.

3. I insisted on using Package for CD. Another colleague stated that Package for CD was not necessary. He felt that File>Save As would be good enough. I explained that that procedure would not bring over the necessary audio files. Is there any other answer (clean) that I could have given him since he was not satisfied with my explanation?

This one’s a little harder to answer.
You can resolve the audio links with your PPT file and the multimedia by putting the files in the same folder with your PPT file before you insert the multimedia into the presentation. Then you could simply burn the folder onto the CD and the links should be intact.

So yes, your colleague is correct that you can do this “manually” and you don’t have to use Package for CD. But it kind of depends on where the sounds were when they were inserted into the presentation.

You can have a look at Sounds/Movies don’t play, images disappear or links break when I move or email a presentation for a more thorough discussion of this.

That said, Package for CD does indeed resolve the links to your multimedia files and so makes your life easier.

In addition, Package for CD gives you the option to include the PPT Viewer so you don’t have to rely on PPT being installed on other computers. And if you’ve used animations or transitions new to PPT 2002 and 2003, you’d want that installed version to be 2002 or 2003 — otherwise those new cool animations and transitions don’t work in PPT 2000 and 97! So that’s where the Viewer comes in — you don’t have to worry what version of PPT is installed on the other systems because the PPT 2003 Viewer plays the presentation from the CD.

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